I used to think fantasy football was ridiculous, but now I'm starting to understand it a little bit more. I mean, look at how much money some of these dudes are making playing fantasy football. And guess what? They're making a lot more than I ever thought they were going to make. This episode is brought to you by Draftkings, America s favorite 1-week fantasy football site where you can win $100,000 or more in one day. Hurry, get your entry into the Millionaire Maker event where first place takes home a million dollars. That's $1 million American real dollars, not like McDonald's or Chuck E. Cheese's. That would be ridiculous. That's a million American REAL dollars! Not like McDonald s bucks or $5 or $10,000, or $20 or $50,000. That s a MILLION American REAL DOLLARS! And you can get 20% off of your first order when you go to MeUndies.co/ROGAN to redeem your First Order when you order when they run out of your current order. You can get free shipping in the United States and free delivery in Canada, plus free shipping up north in Canada. I guarantee you're going to be happy with them. If you don't order them, you won't be happy, but at least you'll be happy. And if you order them by not only that, you'll get free delivery and free shipping. You'll even get a 20% discount when you re-order when they re-up to 20% but you re done, you re getting 20% of the first order, and you re not paying shipping free shipping by meUndies, you get a whole bunch of free shipping too! You re gonna be happy as if you re paying for shipping and free packaging, free shipping, free delivery, and a bunch of stuff like that. You re not just free shipping and shipping, you ll get it all the same thing you ve ever heard of before, right here. I know that's a deal like that, right? . I used to be a skeptic, and now I m a lot of people tell me about it, and I'm going to tell you about it on the podcast and I m going to give it a chance to try them a try and see what they say they re the best underwear I ve ever had in my life, and they're the most comfortable underwear I've ever had.
00:03:49.000Like someone came along and they figured out the better mousetrap.
00:03:52.000They figured out how to make underwear better.
00:03:54.000Go to MeUndies.com forward slash Rogan and get 20% off of your first order.
00:03:59.000That's 20% off your first order when you go to MeUndies.com forward slash Rogan and you'll even get free shipping in the United States and our friends to the north in Canada.
00:07:07.000They're the official cell phone provider for this podcast.
00:07:09.000The phone that we use when I coordinate guests and make calls and stuff, all that stuff is all through Ting.
00:07:16.000If you go to rogan.ting.com, you will save 25 bucks off of any of their devices.
00:07:21.000And they have all the finest Android devices in stock.
00:07:25.000Like the one that I have is the Samsung Galaxy S5, which is pretty awesome.
00:07:30.000It has a lot of features that, like, even with the new iPhones that are coming out doesn't have, like, it's water-resistant, which I don't understand why these people are making electronic devices that aren't water-resistant when they can make ones that are water-resistant.
00:11:19.000I think I would prefer to because being completely deaf was slightly alarming for me, although I realize that sensory deprivation is part of the deal.
00:13:46.000It's all about getting used to the experience, and the more you get used to the experience, the easier it is to slip into the deeper and deeper states.
00:16:19.000More sound deadening, more insulation, better filtration system, stronger reinforced sides, because the Samadhi ones would kind of bow out on the sides a little bit from the water, and sometimes they would rot, and you had to get things replaced.
00:16:43.000Heat pads would short out, it would burn through the linings, and it would leak water everywhere.
00:16:47.000He fixed that by, first of all, by setting this redundant system and having two heat pads too, so if one burns out, you have a second one ready to go.
00:16:56.000And then secondly, he put these thick pond filters.
00:16:59.000He doesn't use the same kind of filters that a lot of people do.
00:17:09.000He's really figured out a lot of different things.
00:17:10.000It's the place to go if you're lucky enough to live in L.A., Well, also if you're lucky enough to be able to get in now, because now he's booked way in advance.
00:20:04.000You could just go every day to the worst possible websites and see the most horrific videos and the most horrific photographs and see the world in the worst possible light if you chose to just immerse yourself.
00:20:21.000I mean, if you really wanted to really change the way you saw the world.
00:20:25.000I mean, you could live on a beautiful tree-lined street with the nicest neighbors and the cutest little dogs barking, and the life looks beautiful.
00:20:34.000But through the portal that is the internet, you can immerse yourself in the most twisted, sadistic minds.
00:20:40.000And it's like you have this decision to not do that.
00:20:44.000That's, in sort of reinforcing that decision and making those choices, you build up your resistance to doing things that are negative.
00:20:57.000You build up your resistance to indulging in negative thoughts.
00:21:03.000Like, one of the weirdest things is, if you've ever seen someone who's never been in any sort of a conflict-type situation, but they get thrown into one and they have a panic attack.
00:21:17.000And then I've seen other people that are in panic situations or rather high-stress situations a lot, and they know how to stay calm and keep cool.
00:21:54.000I was in Hawaii and I actually did it with my four-year-old too.
00:21:59.000I took her with me into the water and she had the mask on and everything and she's looking down and we're seeing the dolphins swimming under us.
00:23:12.000Impose your mind on that situation, because I don't know why, actually, if we have all this evolution, why we panic.
00:23:20.000I mean, they would have thought millions of years of evolution would have got rid of that terrible, dangerous thing called panic, but actually it's there.
00:23:27.000Well, fight or flight, though, is so necessary.
00:23:39.000And when I was competing, there were moments that I was too confident, and I went in and I couldn't compete right.
00:23:45.000I also couldn't snap myself out of it.
00:23:49.000There's a level that you achieve when you're really nervous, and you're not sure of what the outcome is going to be.
00:23:54.000There's a level of reaction and of intensity that you achieve when you go into a competition where you're scared, where you perform so much better.
00:26:14.000I understand that it's a kind of meditative thing also, that if you actually start thinking, I imagine, because I don't do it, but this is what my son-in-law tells me, if you start thinking while you're in there, in that grapple with that other very strong,
00:26:30.000very dangerous person, I don't think that's really good.
00:26:42.000Sometimes you're thinking, but a lot of times you are reacting in what you try to do is achieve sort of a zen state, a flow state.
00:26:51.000And when you're at your best, you're in that flow state where sometimes you'll be in a position where you don't even realize how you achieve the position.
00:28:36.000It makes the regular stress that people go through, the stress of bills and of relationships, it alleviates and mitigates a lot of the issues that people have.
00:28:48.000Because the life or death struggle of someone trying to choke you and you battling it out and you're tired, you're exhausted, and you're trying to remain calm and catch your breath and defend and trying to stay cool and trying to figure out what's the proper defense for this situation.
00:29:03.000And how to turn this around and how to get back to a better spot.
00:29:22.000Or the bills you've got to pay, aren't you?
00:29:23.000No, you're not thinking about any of those things.
00:29:25.000And in that sense, it is very meditative.
00:29:27.000It alleviates a lot of the stress of life.
00:29:29.000And then when it's over, you just kind of feel very relaxed because you've spent all this excess energy that I believe people...
00:29:39.000I mean, it's not a scientific way of looking at the human body, but I think of the human body in a lot of ways as sort of like a battery.
00:29:44.000And a lot of people's batteries are overflowing with juice because you don't use them.
00:29:49.000You sit down in a sedentary state in front of a computer all day, which is pretty bad for your back, and you stare at a screen, and you do your work, and then you sit in your car or on the train or whatever to get home, and then you sit in front of the television.
00:30:22.000When you can get all that energy out in a training session, it does a couple things.
00:30:28.000One, it strengthens your body so that if you ever do have to use it for something, even if something as simple as picking things up or just strength to help move something, you have that.
00:30:39.000But two, you alleviate all the excess energy.
00:30:45.000And by draining the battery, you put more juice in the battery for the future.
00:30:49.000Like the battery has like a higher threshold.
00:30:51.000And then you also like, you can deal with stuff easier.
00:30:54.000Like when I don't train, if I don't exercise, if I don't do some sort of rigorous physical exercise, like at least a few days a week, I react differently to stress.
00:33:20.000It's very possible that there's something to that.
00:33:22.000I think it's very possible that there's something to the idea that we have ingrained in us a certain amount of experiences based on the genetics of all the people that have lived before us.
00:33:32.000And that whatever fight or flight is inside of us, whatever...
00:33:40.000Like, I've been discussing this with friends, like how fascinating this time is, because throughout history, in the past, if a boat of strangers showed up, it was very dangerous.
00:34:12.000Those experiences that led us to, that led the human race to 2014, these experiences of people, pirates showing up and Vikings showing up and all those dangerous people showing up in these different places, you know, people coming over the hill, oh, an army's coming.
00:34:25.000That was just a part of being a human being for the longest time.
00:34:53.000I think that there's a long tradition regarding him and the battle that he was killed in.
00:34:58.000There's even a Shakespeare play where he's at the end of the battle saying famously, my horse, my horse, a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse, so that he can flee.
00:35:07.000But it seems that he died in face-to-face combat and was hacked to pieces as far as I can.
00:35:11.000One of the last of the kings to die like that, too, right?
00:36:20.000If our society were to go into a radical collapse, people could find themselves facing those contingencies very quickly, very, very, very rapidly.
00:36:32.000And it is in fact a radical collapse in other parts of the world.
00:36:35.000I've been talking about this on stage a lot lately.
00:36:43.000Duck Dynasty is this ridiculous American reality show.
00:36:46.000But one of the main guys on Duck Dynasty, he gave this speech, this video speech, where he was talking about the impending apocalypse...
00:36:57.000And what they call the rapture, where Christians think that Jesus is going to come and he's going to take away everybody that's Christian and bring them to heaven and everybody else is going to be stuck on earth.
00:37:07.000I believe there's a very elite group are going to go.
00:37:09.000144,000 of them are going to be floated up in the clouds.
00:37:13.000Apparently so, yeah, with the rapture.
00:37:14.000And he told people that they should watch this Nicolas Cage movie that's about to come out, called Left Behind, that's based on this very famous series of books amongst the Christians, Left Behind.
00:40:01.000Well, maybe it is a great thing at a certain point, at a certain level.
00:40:04.000When you're in a society that's very sectarian, very divided into tribal interests, very divided into different religious groups, maybe it's actually more comfortable if you have a dictator.
00:40:15.000I think the issue is civilizations largely operate on momentum.
00:40:20.000And when things have been set up in the way that they have been in Iraq or the way they have been, obviously, in Somalia, Where there's one guy who's calling all the shots, and they've got this whole thing established, when that guy's not there anymore.
00:40:35.000And then everyone's scrambling to be the new guy.
00:41:01.000You have this hideous death cult called the Islamic State, which may or may not have been initially funded and set up by the United States of America and its allies.
00:41:34.000Ideally, we move to a situation where we have no governments and where people run their own lives and peacefully negotiate with one another.
00:41:41.000But that isn't the way it's going down in Iraq, and it's not the way it's gone down in the southern part of Somalia.
00:41:46.000Yeah, I mean, that would be ideal, right?
00:41:48.000But it's really hard to run a bunch of people.
00:41:52.000Like, the idea of a society, the idea of taking a million people, 500 million people, whatever the number is, and having a group of people that Adhere to the best interests of all the folks that are in that society.
00:42:11.000Their fortune in what situation they find themselves born into is so varied.
00:42:17.000And then you have the people that are fortunate sons and daughters that are trying to keep the unfortunate from getting into their gated community of life.
00:42:25.000And you can be sure that dictators, sons and daughters, are all very well looked after in a dictatorship.
00:42:29.000That always happens, like Saddam's kids, like Siad Barry's kids.
00:42:32.000It's always the case, you know, that they are.
00:42:34.000And that then generates feelings of anger and fury that that is happening.
00:42:38.000But a situation where just bullets are flying down the street constantly and you live in permanent fear of your life, that's not good either.
00:42:48.000Yeah, the arguments that the United States has funded ISIS in order to build up support for an invasion of Saudi Arabia, or of Syria, rather, are really terrifying.
00:43:00.000And more terrifying because I don't want to look into it, because I don't want to know.
00:43:31.000They lie by instinct all the time and the problem with constant lying at the top levels of politics is that it pollutes the debate completely.
00:43:40.000You suddenly can't believe anything that's said and that leads to suspicion of all kinds of horrendous possibilities including the funding and setting in motion of this ISIS horror.
00:43:52.000Yeah, it doesn't help when someone like Julian Assange comes along and exposes all these things that a lot of people disagree with, and what do they do?
00:43:59.000They try to get him locked up on some trumped-up charges and export him, as if they were really trying to export him to Sweden and eventually to the United States because of some sexual thing that wasn't even violent, or it wasn't even rape.
00:44:22.000There's one thing, like, if there was a woman who was saying, hey, Julian Assange, she's a piece of shit, he drugged me, he raped me, you know, okay, yeah, send that guy to Sweden.
00:45:09.000Out of the street and then pop out of a manhole and then scoop him up in a car and take him to Costa Rica or somewhere where they're going to honor.
00:45:17.000No, we live in a time when they're just constant conspiracy theories.
00:45:21.000I mean, there's even conspiracy theories about him, you know, that he is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
00:47:58.000And everybody can say, well, it's great because I live in a democracy.
00:48:01.000At least if you live in a dictatorship, you know you live in a dictatorship.
00:48:04.000And there are certain parameters that you have to work your way around.
00:48:07.000But when you live in a dictatorship that is posing as a democracy, it's more complicated to do.
00:48:13.000And it's where a lot of people truly believe and act as if it is a democracy, but at the very top, there's fuckery and manipulation and coercion and money and corporate greed and interests and the military-industrial complex that is funding all of these maneuvers,
00:48:34.000Not to forget all the big corporations, big pharmaceutical corporations.
00:48:38.000All of this is about management of information that we are given.
00:48:43.000What the internet offers is the opportunity for ordinary people who are not part of a power structure, not running a big corporation, to take power back to themselves.
00:49:13.0002014, where we're at now, it's really only been around in this form for the last decade, like 2004, 2005, and then social media allowing people to exchange information in the heat of political crisis, where they've been able to expose things that are happening in real time that ordinarily would be protected by the media.
00:49:35.000They would shelter and filter the information.
00:49:37.000Now it's all just coming out and they can't...
00:49:39.000So they'd have to shut down the whole fucking internet in some of these countries.
00:49:42.000Which is a very difficult thing to do.
00:49:46.000Now, I've seen the huge shift in power that this has introduced.
00:49:51.000There was a time, just at my own small level, as an author...
00:49:55.000Where I would have depended on the goodwill of the big media in order to get my ideas out there.
00:50:02.000And since my ideas have sometimes been radical and contradictory to the established order of things, it was very difficult to do that.
00:50:09.000Well, I don't need the big media anymore.
00:50:18.000Is the community of like-minded people that I am reaching through social media, through Facebook, through my website.
00:50:25.000Not to say that Facebook is perfect because Facebook is very problematic and is itself a large corporation which is filtering and controlling information.
00:50:44.000I mean, obviously, there's some frauds out there.
00:50:45.000But a lot of when people are commenting, they're commenting using their Facebook identity.
00:50:51.000So that's a real person, as opposed to Twitter or a lot of message boards where you're getting trolls and a lot of assholes that are posting under fake names.
00:50:59.000There's a lot of people out there that it's like a sport to them to be shitty or to rile people up.
00:52:07.000And some people are really good at it.
00:52:09.000And it's like, damn, if you put that energy into something productive, instead of stalking Graham Hancock, you know, and fucking with him all day, you could get a lot of shit done.
00:52:18.000You could probably be a happier person.
00:52:53.000But do you also agree, I definitely feel this about myself, that some of the criticism that I've received, even extreme criticism, even if it's unbalanced, I've benefited from.
00:53:38.000If there are holes in what I'm saying, if my argument is weak in a particular area and you're helping me to see that… The right response is gratitude to that.
00:53:47.000They really are, in a sense, working for you in some way, because, I mean, there's been unwarranted criticism that I've received that have made me rethink a lot of things I do.
00:53:58.000Even if it's unwarranted, they've made me rethink, like, what is causing this reaction?
00:54:03.000Like, is there anything that I could have done differently that could have avoided that?
00:54:08.000Or is this a necessary evil that just comes with the business?
00:54:28.000It's like being back in the village in the old days where...
00:54:32.000You might be directly criticized by one or other of your fellow villagers.
00:54:36.000Well, now our village is the whole world, and it crosses all national boundaries and all religious interests.
00:54:43.000It can be anybody, anywhere, who's taking an interest in you.
00:54:48.000I'm constantly receiving information, some of it critical, some of it positive, through Facebook, in particular through Facebook, which is very helpful to me.
00:55:22.000I've gotten more information from Twitter, more interesting websites that people have sent me to, more interesting articles that people have sent me to than any other resource that I've ever been in contact with.
00:55:33.000Directly because of interacting with people, and when they send me interesting things, I retweet them, and then those retweets get seen by a large number of people, so people see that I do that, and so they send me more interesting stuff.
00:55:48.000It's establishing a network in that sense.
00:55:51.000It's a whole new situation, which we've not faced before, done on a gigantic scale, and What it means is that information which used to be strictly controlled and in the hands of elites is now changing.
00:56:09.000The power structure of information is changing entirely and that's potentially a very exciting new time to live in and great things are coming out of it.
00:56:17.000It's easy to say this, but I think a new consciousness is dawning in the world, actually.
00:56:24.000I think the old way of doing things is still extremely strong, but people are waking up to their power and saying, you know, I am not simply to be pushed around and told what to do by people.
00:56:38.000An expert or a government official or a corporation.
00:57:03.000But when the history of this time comes to be written...
00:57:05.000There'll have to be some perspective on it 200-300 years from now.
00:57:08.000It will be seen as one of the most extraordinary moments in the whole human story.
00:57:13.000My friend Amber Lyon has an interesting way of talking about certain events and one of the things she talks about when it comes to corporate control of information and things along the lines of the Julian Assange situation She talks about being on the wrong side of history,
00:57:32.000The people that are trying to suppress information in that way, and the information that would directly affect the lives, but the consciousness of the entire culture.
00:58:51.000In every case, Pandora's box has been opened and the immediate result has been that things got way worse than they were before.
00:58:59.000And then, you know, if we're talking about the dark side, the negative side of things as well, there is this horrible problem of bigoted religious fundamentalism, which is not confined to the Islamic world by any means.
00:59:16.000I mean, there are many Christian bigots as well.
00:59:19.000There's a tendency for people to cling on to old and devalued ideas and to have an almost religious, fanatical commitment to them and be willing.
00:59:31.000I mean, what idea is worth killing another fellow human being for because they don't share your idea?
00:59:37.000It's a horrendous, horrendous situation that this happens.
01:00:09.000I followed a few guys There was this thing that was going on with his interaction with the other people.
01:00:16.000There was this intense camaraderie, this intense camaraderie with his other Islamic warriors, you know, that they all looked at it.
01:00:24.000Everyone was brothers and sisters and everyone was, you know, it was all, there was great intensity to all of the decisions that were being made and great intensity to the bonds they all had, you know, fighting against what they thought was the evil United States government.
01:00:38.000And, unfortunately, there was also some things that he said that, you know, they were talking about how everybody's freaking out, that one head got cut off, one body part got cut off of this one guy, but what about the thousands of people that are blown to bits by these drones that no one's talking about?
01:01:19.000You're talking about one individual as opposed to thousands of people that have been killed by drones that are innocent.
01:01:25.000Completely innocent people who are so-called collateral damage, who are just ripped apart by our high-tech weapons, which will behead a person in an instant, slice body parts off just completely broken.
01:01:59.000Well, that's the real thing, because then you come back to the question of the manipulation of public opinion by very small interest groups who have...
01:02:08.000A very unbalanced control of information.
01:02:15.000If it's not you and it's not I, do we take responsibility for people we don't even know, doing things that are under the orders of people we also don't know, and under the influence of corporations, we're not really exactly sure who's pulling the strings or how it's getting done or what politicians are moving what pieces into place.
01:03:55.000It involves detaching ourselves from controlling orders and actually thinking As human beings, thinking for ourselves.
01:04:03.000Very difficult to do, but I think it's happening.
01:04:05.000I also think that that conflict, the conflict of battling against the negative, builds up the positive in some strange way.
01:04:13.000I mean, the anti-war movement was really a big part of what made the hippie movement of the 60s.
01:04:19.000Like, a lot of it was in response to the Vietnam War.
01:04:22.000There's this war that people knew to be unjust, and so this flower power, love power movement LSD and marijuana and all that came out of that.
01:04:33.000That very resistance to killing people that didn't do anything bad to us.
01:04:40.000But then, of course, there was then a counter-reaction to that, which we call the war on drugs, which slapped down on that and shut it all down again.
01:04:48.000I mean, I know you're not big into supernatural issues, but when I look at all of this, I have to say the Gnostics who...
01:04:59.000If I simplify the Gnostic ideas, we know about Gnostic ideas because a batch of texts were found buried at a place called Nakamadi in Upper Egypt near the Temple of Dendera in Upper Egypt, and they'd been buried for 1,600 years.
01:05:15.000And they were found in 1945, and they contain a complete corpus of ideas of a people who call themselves the Gnostics.
01:05:23.000And they see a dark force at work in the universe, which is seeking to snuff out the divine spark in humanity.
01:05:35.000And what they say is that the entity who we've been taught for the last 2,000-plus years to believe is God, The God of Abraham, who may be called Yahweh or who may be called Allah, that from the Gnostic point of view,
01:05:54.000That's a lower-level supernatural who's got this huge inflated ego, who wants to be praised and worshipped, who's constantly urging his followers on to acts of violence and war.
01:06:06.000And I think we cannot say there are any facts in this area.
01:06:11.000Maybe it's just the dark side of the human psyche, and maybe it's all generated by our brains, or maybe there is a supernatural realm.
01:06:18.000But I think Gnosticism is a very useful tool to look at the society we live in today.
01:06:26.000They believed that there were entities called archons who are evil angels who disguise themselves as human beings and mingle with us to drive us into all manner of That's why the serpent in the Garden of Eden Is the good guy in the Gnostic frame of reference.
01:06:54.000That's very bizarre, the serpent being the good guy.
01:06:56.000He's the good guy because he's saying to Adam and Eve, you have to know the difference between good and evil.
01:07:02.000You can't just be these thoughtless meat creatures, you know, who are wandering around in a happy daze in the garden.
01:07:10.000If you're going to grow and develop, you have to make choices between good and evil.
01:07:14.000And it's the tree of knowledge of good and evil that the serpent introduces Adam and Eve to.
01:08:24.000Now, I know that all the fundamentalist Christians out there are going to say Hancock is a devil worshipper because he's saying that the serpent is the good guy.
01:08:30.000But that's what the Gnostics said, and there was a deep and ancient study of the mystery of life and the mystery of reality.
01:08:36.000I've read somewhere, I don't remember the source, but I read somewhere where they were talking about the interpretations of ancient languages and the translations from, you know, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, all to Greek, Latin, that a lot of things got lost along the way in the confusion,
01:08:51.000and that one of the confusions was that the word apple, It could be interpreted also as red.
01:09:01.000And that it wasn't an apple, but that it was a red.
01:09:04.000And that red being the color of the Amanita Muscaria.
01:09:09.000I mean, folks have to understand, if they've never tried to pay attention to how people translate ancient languages, And then try to translate them several times, not just into, you know, from ancient Hebrew to Latin, but also from Latin to Greek,
01:09:27.000There's so much that gets weirded out along the way.
01:09:30.000Like, if you've ever taken a phrase from, like, a Russian website where you don't know what they're saying and then put it into, like, Google Translate and you see the English version of what they're saying, like, Oh my God, it's so convoluted and confusing because of the way the structure of their language is very different.
01:09:46.000The grammar that they use is very different.
01:09:48.000And it's nothing in comparison to how different it was in ancient times.
01:09:52.000A lot get lost in translation, and a lot the translator imposes his or her idea of how things should be on the material.
01:10:01.000And many of the texts that come down to us are...
01:10:29.000And became the state religion of the most powerful militaristic empire of the ancient world.
01:10:34.000It set about destroying all competitors.
01:10:37.000And amongst those it destroyed were the Gnostics.
01:10:39.000And they were burnt at the stake from a very early date.
01:10:42.000But some Gnostic sects survived and they have left us images.
01:10:46.000And there are a number of Gnostic churches.
01:10:48.000These guys saw themselves as Christians.
01:10:50.000There are a number of Gnostic churches where they painted the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil quite specifically as Amanita Muscaria.
01:10:58.000Yeah, and even in French frescoes, what is that fresco from like, it was, I don't remember the year, but it was an Adam and Eve portrayal that showed several different types of mushrooms.
01:11:11.000Several different types of mushrooms, I know the one you mean.
01:11:13.000Including psilocybin, and it's Adam and Eve clearly standing.
01:11:16.000And it makes you wonder, like, this was in, not modern times, but not 5,000 years.
01:11:22.000No, this was like 1200 AD. It was like 800 years ago, something like that.
01:11:27.000We were at the tail end of the last surviving Gnostic sects.
01:11:31.000The Cathars in the southwest of France are an example of a Gnostic sect who survived through until the Catholic Church wiped them out with the so-called Albigensian Crusades, a truly horrendous act of ethnic murder that took place in the 1200s.
01:11:48.000So we're actually not that long ago, and things have survived from that time.
01:11:53.000And it's very interesting that they are clearly indicating that the psychedelic experience is of crucial importance, that it's a liberating experience, that it allows us to wake up Right.
01:12:28.000And the intent with which you go into it.
01:12:32.000And what we're seeing now, again, history has been obscured from us, but recent research is showing, for example, the famous Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece.
01:12:45.000Pilgrims came from all over Greece once a year to undergo an experience, and that experience involved drinking a brew.
01:12:51.000We can now say with absolute certainty that that was a brew closely, that there were elements in it closely related to LSD. How do we know that with absolute certainty?
01:13:01.000Because the work has been done by Hoffman, by Gordon Wasson, and others.
01:13:07.000There's a very detailed study of what was in that brew.
01:13:12.000And growing on the barley that was used in the brew was a form of ergot.
01:13:19.000Which contained LSD amides and which was soluble in water.
01:13:23.000They've really done the science in great depth.
01:13:25.000And when you read the accounts, you know, of great figures from the ancient world, people like Plato or Socrates, who went and had the experience at the Eleusinian Mysteries, they drink this, they enter a darkened series of corridors and passageways and chambers in this huge temple, and this light appears and they start seeing visions.
01:13:52.000They felt that there were several of the ancients who had this experience and who said that after having had this experience, they lost their fear of death, that they understood.
01:14:03.000Now, we could argue about that, but that was the experience that they had.
01:14:07.000Yeah, that's the experience that a lot of people have when they take acid.
01:14:10.000One of the things that Larry Hagman said, who is a popular American actor, he did this interview when he was on CNN, and they were talking to him about death, and he said that LSD completely took away his fear of death.
01:14:24.000He just didn't mean what it meant before.
01:14:28.000Because you realize you're part of something larger.
01:15:18.000You know, and destroy and kill and leave horrible, horrible lives in the wake of their ridiculous detachment from these universal ideas.
01:15:30.000We are a part of a giant collective consciousness.
01:15:34.000And that's almost impossible to get to that without something.
01:15:38.000Whether it's yoga, whether it's DMT, whether it's something that you ingest that gets you to that understanding.
01:15:46.000That understanding is very difficult to realize.
01:15:49.000With our normal conditioning, the normal alpha male primate behavior that we have in bed.
01:16:06.000Our friend in many ways and it's a good state of consciousness but there are so many other states of consciousness that are of value and that need to be sought out.
01:16:14.000Now some people are very lucky and they can get into deeply altered states of consciousness and see reality in a different way without needing to take any substance.
01:16:25.000Or they can get there through meditation or they can get there through floating in a flotation tank.
01:16:31.000But for a lot of people a very powerful vehicle For changing our perspective on the nature of reality has been, for thousands of years, the psychedelic experience.
01:16:42.000And it's time that we rehabilitated that and gave it a place in our society.
01:16:46.000Well, I think, as you were talking about earlier, that this is a time of great change.
01:16:49.000I think this is a time of great awakening when it comes to psychedelics.
01:16:53.000I was listening to this guy, Sturgill Simpson.
01:17:45.000I see it all the time when I go and speak at events, at conferences.
01:17:47.000People come to me with their art, and I'm seeing this huge explosion of visionary creativity taking place.
01:17:56.000And I'm constantly meeting people whose lives have been transformed by these experiences.
01:18:03.000And I think a lot of people are getting informed by guys like you who have written books on these experiences, from Supernatural to your own discussions, including the one that got banned from TED. The whole TED thing has kind of been exposed as being this really bizarre,
01:18:23.000Thing that's done a lot of great good.
01:18:24.000I mean, I'm a big fan of a lot of the speakers that have come on TED. But I had Eddie Huang on the show where he talked about his experience in TED, where they kicked him out because he left there to do my podcast.
01:18:37.000They wanted him to be a part of this whole thing all day where you had to hang out.
01:18:40.000He had to stay in a hotel room with someone else.
01:18:56.000Well, it's also become intensely profitable.
01:18:58.000And when things become intensely profitable, they become this giant business that's part of why your talk got banned from TED instead of having an open discourse about agreeing or disagreeing about what you're saying.
01:19:23.000There's almost a cult of people that are afraid of debating ideas that are very controversial and very difficult to nail down, especially when you're talking about the emergence of consciousness in early man.
01:19:36.000Okay, no one knows how the fuck people got from hunting things to drawing on cave walls to experiencing visionary psychedelic states, but we do know that happened.
01:20:18.000That would probably be in the 1930s somewhere.
01:20:21.000And then Wasson, Gordon Wasson was in like the 50s, is that what it was?
01:20:25.000Yeah, 50s, goes down to Mexico, encounters Maria Sabina has a mushroom experience and that's the beginning of the mushroom story in the West actually.
01:20:34.000So that's like modern Western culture and civilization.
01:21:14.000But it's a weird thing where people are ignoring that aspect and concentrating on all the other potential aspects which I think probably worked in some sort of a symbiotic fashion.
01:21:23.000The introduction of meat into the diet, the experimenting with different food sources because of the changing of the climate.
01:21:30.000There was a lot of factors that We're good to go.
01:22:13.000If you haven't had a psychedelic experience, and you're talking about psychedelic experiences being not a factor or non-effective, you're crazy.
01:22:24.000Because people who've not had the experience at all, they don't, even in my view, need to come to the table, because they've got nothing to bring to the discussion.
01:22:33.000I don't mind if they come to the table, but I find their arguments to be almost hilarious.
01:22:38.000I have a very good friend who's a very intelligent guy, and he's never taken any drugs.
01:22:43.000And his take on it is, and he's a brilliant guy, I love talking to him, but his take on it is simply, all the work's been done.
01:22:51.000I'm not going to learn anything new from that.
01:23:42.000That's also very intense and very, very extraordinary.
01:23:45.000Yes, we can go scuba diving to the depths.
01:23:47.000But if we look at the whole range of human experiences and say, what is one of the most intense and potentially most transformative experiences as possible to have, I would say DMT done with the right intention in the right context is right up there with anything else.
01:24:02.000It's the most intense thing I've ever experienced.
01:24:09.000And it doesn't mean that those things aren't intense as well.
01:24:12.000But to deny the impact of those things, it seems silly.
01:24:16.000And the people that are arguing against the efficacy of these experiences, or against the influence of these experiences, to have those people actually have never had taken these experiences arguing against It seems so silly.
01:24:54.000Well, you know, McKenna found out about DMT by a friend who was a scientist who worked at the Army Research Lab, and they had like a barrel of the stuff.
01:25:02.000They had a fucking barrel of DMT. DMT is very small doses that are transformative.
01:25:12.000These tiny little doses that you smoke take you into these incredible realms.
01:25:18.000Or LSD. I mean, McKenna described LSD in the best way I've ever heard, is that the amount of LSD you need for it to be effective is like an ant that can break down the Empire State Building in 30 minutes.
01:27:19.000I mean, talking about psychedelics, what's happening with cannabis in the United States right now is very interesting to me coming from Britain where nobody is ever even willing to contemplate the legalization or the de-restriction of cannabis.
01:27:36.000But in America, state by state, I think?
01:28:17.000Again, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories like how Monsanto is going to take it over and so on and so forth.
01:28:21.000But I see it as a really good thing that these barriers in the heartland of the war of drugs are being broken down by the American people themselves.
01:28:30.000And I say kudos to the American people for getting on and making that happen because it's going to be a benefit to the whole world.
01:28:36.000Yeah, Warren Buffet is starting to get into the marijuana trade.
01:28:41.000Because when you've got a guy who's worth $90 billion or whatever the hell he's worth, that's when things are going to get very interesting.
01:28:48.000I mean, people are going to make commercial advantage of this.
01:28:52.000But at the end of the day, I just come back to this is something that I've said again and again as the years have gone by.
01:28:57.000For me, the fundamental issue is the right of the adult to to make sovereign decisions about their own consciousness and one of those sovereign decisions has to be the right to use cannabis or not to use it but one must be free to make that decision and not controlled by society and once that is recognized once all the scare stories about cannabis go away and we find that in fact state by state it's a positive rather than a harmful thing I think
01:29:27.000that the question marks are going to begin to arise over the psychedelics too, and we're going to see all those barriers breaking down in the years to come.
01:29:37.000I think bringing up Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's company, specifically, what's happening is he's a part of this company.
01:29:46.000He's a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has this company called Cubic Designs, and they sell, they maximize usable floor space in warehouses,
01:30:01.000and they send 1,000 flyers to weed dispensaries.
01:30:04.000In recent weeks, and these flyers, they show these medical marijuana grow-ups, and it's like double your usable growing space.
01:30:12.000This is intense stuff, because it's companies that are real estate holders that have giant amounts of money invested in this that are saying, you know what, we're going to dip our feet into this growing marijuana industry.
01:30:28.000I have a friend who works at a dispensary in Colorado, and the dispensary is $5 Five acres indoor.
01:31:39.000So every marijuana joint that gets sold, if it's sold for a dollar, 39 cents, no one's selling it for a dollar, but if it's sold for $100, $39 is going to the government.
01:31:49.000So they're making over $100 million this year in taxes, just in Colorado.
01:32:01.000But they're finally allowing the people to put their money in banks, which was, for a long time, they had to do this weird shit where they had to Like, put it in safe deposit boxes, or they had to take the cash and then use it to buy bank notes and buy bank checks.
01:32:18.000They weren't allowing them to use credit cards or any of the normal ways that people do business that keep them from being robbed at gunpoint by criminals, untrackable bills.
01:32:28.000So they had these kids that were driving around with stacks of cash.
01:32:53.000People are just not prepared to put up with that fucking shit any longer.
01:32:57.000They're not prepared to put up with it.
01:32:59.000To be told what to think, to be told what to do with their own consciousness.
01:33:04.000And it's great that it's Americans who are leading the way in this and the rest of the world is watching.
01:33:11.000And all the lies we've been told about cannabis, they're going to just drift away and be wrecked and destroyed forever by what's happening in America.
01:33:20.000So it's a great service that's being...
01:33:39.000I mean, it's very crazy to smoke it from 9 in the morning until 2 o'clock the next morning, seven days a week, or rather vaporize it as I... As I did.
01:33:47.000And I reached a point, thanks to a series of ayahuasca journeys, in October 2011, where I made the decision that I wouldn't smoke cannabis.
01:33:55.000Now, three years have come since then.
01:33:56.000But I want to live in a society where I and fellow adults are free to choose either to...
01:34:03.000Use cannabis or not to use it without any state agent sticking their nose in our private business.
01:34:10.000This is our private business, what we do with our own consciousness.
01:34:14.000And it's incredibly encouraging to see that the Americans are taking that power back and showing the rest of the world how to do it.
01:34:23.000And also, anti-pot doctors are being exposed.
01:34:27.000It's really fascinating, all these doctors that are paid off by pharmaceutical companies.
01:34:32.000There was an article recently about anti-pot doctors being paid off, and all of the leading anti-pot doctors, all of them, are paid off.
01:34:45.000Well, it's interesting that guys like Sanjay Gupta, who used to do that, who used to be on board with that, now has stepped up, come out in a huge way.
01:34:53.000And he's also starting to address psychedelics, starting to address what's going on with psilocybin, the new study that's shown these people that took psilocybin and quit smoking.
01:35:02.000Six months later, 80% of them, some large number, 70 or 80% quit smoking and didn't go back to it because of just the clarity of those visions where you kind of understand, like, what am I doing?
01:35:16.000You really get that perspective on yourself.
01:35:18.000And that's the big news, you know, that these things are positive and beneficial.
01:35:24.000And the way forward for society is to create...
01:35:28.000Positive social environment and positive spaces in which we can explore these experiences, and the result for society as a whole will be very positive.
01:35:58.000He's been quoted in the press in academic publications warning against the use of marijuana, which he stresses may cause wide-ranging addiction.
01:36:10.000When he's writing his anti-pot opinion pieces for CBS News or being quoted by NBR and CNBC, what's left unsaid is that Clever has served as a paid consultant to leading prescription drug companies including Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin,
01:36:27.000Reckitt Bankizer, the producer of painkiller called Neurofin, and Alkermes, the producer of a powerful new opiate...
01:37:12.000And doctors are on the take to keep promoting that and to stop us exercising our free choice as adults to manage our pain in other ways, for example, with cannabis.
01:37:22.000And even if it was just 16 deaths, obviously, 16,000.
01:37:25.000If it was 16 deaths, that's 16 more than cannabis.
01:38:16.000Because they're in pain all the time because they're lifting all this crazy weight and they're fucking up their body while they're doing it.
01:38:20.000And they take acetaminophen, all these different Valiums, Percocets, and that stuff just destroys their kidneys.
01:38:48.000So I'm wondering now, three years after I gave up cannabis, whether the time has come to dip my toes back in the water in a respectful way, not do it every day, have some sacred moments.
01:40:55.000You know, I used to say, marijuana is not addictive.
01:40:57.000And I don't think it is with most people.
01:41:00.000But I think biological diversity, biodiversity in human beings is such that, like, there's certain folks that have weird reactions to all kinds of different things.
01:42:41.000That's the big untold story about antidepressants.
01:42:43.000Many antidepressants cause people to kill themselves.
01:42:45.000How about antidepressants that supplement the antidepressants?
01:42:51.000There's a certain antidepressant, I forget what it was called, that had insane side effects that they were promoting as a supplement to your regular antidepressant.
01:43:01.000If your regular antidepressant isn't doing it, mix it up with this one.
01:43:04.000But this one could cause fucking kidney failure, your dick might fly across the room like a mockingbird.
01:43:10.000Anything could happen to you, but you might not be depressed, or you might.
01:43:20.000Well, it's also the idea of commercials.
01:43:22.000Commercials are influential, and the influence of commercials is very insidious, because there's one thing if a commercial is influencing you to buy a particular vacuum cleaner.
01:43:34.000Hey, look, if you're If you're too much of a knucklehead to go on Consumer Reports or to read reviews online by independent people that tell you, this vacuum cleaner is great, this vacuum cleaner sucks, if you're too much of a knucklehead to do that, I don't feel bad for you.
01:44:28.000Also, what's insidious about it is selling it on television like that does a huge disservice to the actual people that could use antidepressants because they have a real mental imbalance.
01:44:54.000Adjust it and make their life wonderful.
01:44:56.000People that have a miserable life, they can make their life wonderful.
01:44:58.000But instead, people will trivialize it because you see a commercial where a chick's running around a field of wheat and spinning around with her baby, and then someone says, I want to live like that, and then they call her a fucking doctor, and next thing you know, you're on a pill that you didn't need.
01:45:11.000If you just started eating vegetables and going jogging every day, you'd be a way happier person than you were on that pill.
01:45:17.000And again, let me say outright that the psychedelics are very effective antidepressants.
01:45:23.000Psilocybin, being trial tested in human communities for thousands and thousands of years.
01:45:29.000Ayahuasca in the Amazon, at least 4,000 years of use.
01:45:32.000And anybody who's worked with psilocybin or ayahuasca enough will know that they do help with mood.
01:45:39.000They do help you take a more positive outlook on life.
01:45:43.000And whether that's to do with altering the chemical balance in the brain, because they do work on the serotonin system in the brain chemically, or whether it's to do with the revelation that one has that life is an incredible gift and an incredible joy and a privilege to be alive.
01:46:02.000We're immersed in the cares and woes of daily life, constantly struggling to pay the next bills, to get on in work, relentlessly driven by To produce and consume and we forget that it's a magical, enchanted Gorgeous,
01:46:19.000glorious universe that we live in and we have this amazing bodies and we should just celebrate every minute of it.
01:46:28.000It's hard to keep a balanced perspective, but I think it's also important to realize that perspective-shifting, consciousness-shifting experiences can also change the way you look at the world, and when you change the way you look at the world, it can adjust the way your brain functions.
01:46:44.000And that it's not an either-or situation.
01:47:59.000And it's something, you know, really worth looking at.
01:48:01.000And that is enhanced in psychedelic experiences.
01:48:04.000The perspective enhancing aspects of that, I do believe, can change your overall health or change your overall consciousness, which can change your overall health.
01:48:38.000It's a really important conversation to have.
01:48:43.000To the bottom of what it's about, it's about this whole issue of us taking back power over ourselves.
01:48:50.000That's what it's really about, and it needs to be seen in that context, to make decisions about our own lives, right or wrong, and to learn from our mistakes and to grow and develop as a result.
01:49:02.000I think it's also super important that you discussed your relationship with cannabis in an abusive way, too.
01:51:44.000Well, for you, it must be incredible, because that's the site of so many ancient, huge, monolithic structures that are unexplained, as far as their construction methods or...
01:51:52.000So the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek Temple of Jupiter?
01:52:41.000That they built those foundations and they built the temple.
01:52:45.000I think, and many researchers who've studied them in this field agree with me on this, that actually the Romans found a much more ancient site, which was just extraordinarily megalithic, gigantic stones, and they built their temple completely.
01:54:22.000The Romans found they could move the 840 tonne blocks, and they did.
01:54:28.000This is the orthodox theory, and then they built their temple on top of it.
01:54:32.000But they found they couldn't move these 1,200 plus tonne blocks, and by the way, this one is completely separated from the bedrock out of which it's been caught.
01:54:42.000They couldn't move them, so they left them in the quarry.
01:54:45.000I think that actually proves that the Romans didn't create the 840 ton megalith, because if the Romans had known that these gigantic blocks, if they had cut the blocks, okay, if they had cut them themselves, which we must say they did,
01:55:01.000if we are saying that the Romans were responsible for these megaliths, if the Romans had cut these blocks themselves, they knew they were there.
01:55:08.000And the very first thing they would have used for the smaller blocks that they put into place in the Temple of Jupiter was these large blocks.
01:55:16.000They would have sliced them up like a loaf of bread into smaller blocks and moved those over to the temples.
01:55:21.000The fact that these huge megaliths still stand in the quarry suggests to me that they were buried when the Romans came to that site because otherwise it would have been the very first thing they would have used for quarrying smaller blocks.
01:55:32.000That they were buried and that the Romans found an existing prehistoric megalithic platform And on top of it, they built their Temple of Jupiter.
01:57:00.000And there are plenty of people arguing that the Romans did it.
01:57:03.000I feel, along with other researchers who've approached this subject, I feel I want to look at alternative possibilities for what these megaliths are all about.
01:57:10.000And that's one of the things I've been doing for the last year is traveling around the world.
01:57:15.000I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to do this.
01:57:24.000And one of the countries that I visited, and I want to really mention this, is Armenia, where I have seen incredible stone circles, just wonderful buildings.
01:59:01.000But the effect is, because the Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars and which we observe the other celestial bodies, such as the moon and the sun, the Earth is our viewing platform.
01:59:10.000If you change the orientation in space of that viewing platform, then the rising points of stars, the moon, the sun change, and the positions of the stars and the sky change.
01:59:29.000Anybody can buy computer software today, which will show you the ancient skies over any point on the Earth's surface at any time in the last 30,000 years.
02:01:10.000You pretty soon discover that stars were incredibly important to them.
02:01:13.000Stars cover the inside of the ceilings of all tombs, all the pharaoh's tombs, for example.
02:01:21.000Monuments are lined up to particular places on the horizon where a star, perhaps it's Sirius, whose counterpart amongst the gods was the goddess Isis.
02:01:45.000Are the constellations that are being said to have a reflection upon the ground in architecture, were they significant to the culture concerned?
02:01:54.000The constellation of Orion was of enormous significance to the ancient Egyptians.
02:01:58.000Therefore, It has to be a matter of interest that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in a pattern that is temptingly similar to the pattern of the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion.
02:02:10.000Temptingly similar, but there's something else.
02:02:13.000Then you have shafts which run through the body of the Great Pyramid.
02:02:18.000There's a place called the King's Chamber high up in the Great Pyramid.
02:02:21.000It has a shaft in its north and south wall, which are about eight inches high and eight inches wide.
02:02:26.000And those shafts cut all the way through the body of the pyramid, and they come out on the south and north sides of the pyramid.
02:02:31.000You can actually, and it's been done in the past, you can drop a cannonball in at the outside entrance to those shafts, and that cannonball moments later will appear in the king's chamber.
02:02:42.000In the queen's chamber down below, there are also two shafts.
02:02:46.000These shafts do not exit on the outside of the pyramid, which creates a mystery of its own, of great interest, what is at the other end of those shafts, but they do have very definite alignments.
02:03:11.000All of those four shafts that shoot up out of the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber all targeted very significant stars in the sky at that time.
02:03:21.000Like, for example, the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber targeted the star Sirius at exactly the moment that the star crosses the meridian.
02:03:28.000That's the north-south line that divides the sky above our heads.
02:03:31.000At exactly the moment that the star crosses that line The shaft targets it and you could fire a laser beam up and you'd hit that, in theory, you'd hit that star.
02:03:42.000So they're locking the pyramid in, in the epoch of 2500 BC, to four significant stars in the sky.
02:03:50.000Another one of those stars is the lowest star of the belt of Orion.
02:03:54.000That tells us that this is a dating mechanism of some kind.
02:03:59.000And it can't be an accident that that's the case.
02:04:01.000And once you understand precession, you understand that these alignments will change.
02:04:04.000So it therefore becomes very interesting to discover that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground, which Robert argues are the terrestrial reflection of the three stars of the belt of Orion, that the orientation of the pyramids on the ground because of precession shifts very slowly down the ages.
02:04:22.000And you can see this clearly on any good SkyMap program.
02:04:27.000As you go back in time, you find that the constellation of Orion, at the moment it crosses the meridian, the same place that was targeting the star Sirius at the moment it crosses the meridian, that the perfect alignment between the belt stars of Orion and the three great pyramids of Giza is not in 2500 BC,
02:04:43.000but in 10,500 BC, 8,000 years earlier.
02:04:46.000So we have a very interesting problem here.
02:04:51.000Or the pyramids are monuments that speak both to the age of the ancient Egyptians, 2500 BC, and to a much earlier time.
02:04:58.000Wasn't it also the same time where the Sphinx was pointing towards the constellation Leo?
02:05:03.000Well, that's, again, the third part of the lock, and Robert and I looked at this in depth together in our book called The Message of the Sphinx.
02:05:09.000And so we have the Giza Plateau, we have the three pyramids laid out on the ground in the pattern of the belt of Orion in 10,500 BC. That's looking south.
02:05:22.000East, of course, is where the sun rises, but people who don't observe the sun don't realize that the sun tracks back and forth along the horizon during the solar year.
02:05:29.000It reaches its northernmost point on the summer solstice, 21st of June, and its southernmost point on the winter solstice, 21st of December.
02:05:40.000On the equinox, The day that night and day are of equal length, the sun rises directly perfectly due east.
02:05:48.000That's actually how you define an equinox, because the sun is rising perfectly due east.
02:06:11.000It's a group of constellations that by chance the sun passes through during the course of the year.
02:06:18.000But that The constellation that the sun rises against the background of is also affected by precession, the wobble on the axis of the earth, and that changes.
02:06:28.000You have roughly 2,160 years in each house of the zodiac.
02:06:32.000For the last 2,160 years, we've been in Pisces.
02:06:36.000And as I often say, it's not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.
02:06:41.000Before that, it was the constellation of Aries.
02:06:51.000Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Great Sphinx is a lion, admittedly with a human head, but that head is rather small and we think that the head almost certainly was re-carved in a later time.
02:07:02.000Probably the whole statue was originally a lion, crouching there on the horizon, gazing due east, At the rising sun on the equinox and at the constellation behind the sun.
02:07:13.000And that constellation is, in 10,500 BC, the constellation of Leo.
02:08:00.000It's dated by the German Archaeological Institute.
02:08:02.000They discover that this huge complex of stone circles has been deliberately buried 10,000 years ago.
02:08:09.000And the carbon dating, because you can't date stones, you have to date organic materials, the carbon dating of organic materials found with...
02:08:17.000Those stone circles puts their age back to 12,000 years and more.
02:08:21.000For you, that must have been like Christmas.
02:08:32.000I have to confess that it was a nice moment for me when the New Scientist magazine in Britain...
02:08:40.000Which, years ago, back in the 90s, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods, was amongst the magazines that attacked my work as, quote-unquote, pseudoscientific.
02:08:48.000I don't know how my work can be pseudoscientific, because I don't claim to be a scientist.
02:09:02.000So anyway, New Scientist magazine, back in the 1980s, 90s was saying that I was wrong.
02:09:11.000The basic message of Fingerprints of the Gods is history is much older and much more mysterious than we've been told.
02:09:16.000So it was great in October 2013 when New Scientist magazine came out with a headline saying history is much older and more mysterious than we thought.
02:09:38.000And by the way, I'll just say, I guess we may be running out of time, but I'll just say, are we good?
02:09:42.000I'll just say also Indonesia, which is the other place that my wife, Santa, and I have done a lot of research in the last six or seven months, has been found what was thought to be a 2,500-year-old site on top of a hill,
02:09:58.000a site made of blocks of columnar basalt, which forms naturally, but which can be used as a construction medium.
02:10:07.000It's called Gunung Padang and on the top of a hill in a series of terraces is a rather extraordinary monument thought to be about 2,500 years old made of these blocks of columnar basalt.
02:10:18.000No really thorough research was ever done by archaeologists.
02:10:21.000A little bit of trenching down to about half a meter in depth was done and some carbon was brought up and dated.
02:10:27.000But really the site, it was just kind of taken for granted that it was two and a half thousand years old.
02:10:31.000Along comes Danny Natawajija, who is a Caltech-trained PhD geologist working out of the city of Bandung in a government agency of the Indonesian government.
02:10:43.000In fact, he particularly focuses on earthquakes.
02:11:12.000It looks like a hill, but inside it's a man-made structure.
02:11:17.000That was Danny's intuition, but then he had to prove it.
02:11:19.000So he put together a team and they did a huge amount of remote sensing work and some core drilling down to depths of about 15 meters into the top of the hill.
02:11:29.000And what they discovered was incredibly tempting.
02:11:32.000It supports Danny's intuition that we are looking at a man-made pyramid here.
02:11:36.000It produces dates that go back as much as 26,000 years, right into the last ice age.
02:11:44.000And the remote sensing equipment shows rather regular cavities inside the monument, which look like chambers of some kind.
02:11:53.000Well, naturally, Danny and his team were stopped working for quite a long while by the archaeological establishment in Indonesia, who said, we know that this structure is 2,500 years old, and there's no need for any further research on it, and it just disturbs the local villagers and, you know, go away.
02:12:08.000And so they lobbied and they had him stopped.
02:12:10.000But Danny took it to the highest level.
02:12:12.000He got the support of the Indonesian government, and two and a half weeks ago, they started work excavating, thoroughly excavating Gunung Pada.
02:12:27.000And again, you know, I can't summon up a map magically, but if I were to do so, consider Indonesia, which is a long string of islands, I think?
02:13:24.0001995. 1995. And now, you know, after being scorned and put down by the archaeological establishment, there is enough new evidence out there for me to produce a whole other book.
02:13:59.000Yeah, just one discovery, like that one farmer finding this stone in Gobekli Tepe unearths this incredible structure that rewrites history.
02:14:07.000And that piece of stone is seen by American archaeologists in the 1950s.
02:14:14.000And they decide not to look at it because it's so finely done that they think it belongs to the Ottoman period within the last four or five hundred years.
02:14:21.000Actually, it turns out to be 12,000 years old.
02:14:23.000What's good that they didn't fuck with it, they probably would have...
02:14:47.000And now that they've finished the excavations, they decide that in that particular area, they're excavating other areas, they decide to stick this horrendous roof over it, which cuts out the light, makes it impossible to see the stone pillars.
02:14:59.000The roof is badly built, so there are platforms built inside it on which huge heaps of stones have been piled up.
02:15:05.000That's to keep the roof on if there's any high winds.
02:15:09.000So suddenly the possibility of any kind of magical experience at the world's most intriguing place.
02:15:13.000And mysterious ancient site is completely written off by this hideous piece of so-called protective architecture, which in my view is just the worst kind of vandalism.
02:15:53.000Nobody else will really get to form an opinion about it because we're going to damage its appearance so much in protecting it that it'll lose its essential mystery.
02:16:03.000Well, it just seems bizarre that they're trying to protect stone.
02:17:43.000And that's now what it's getting, fortunately.
02:17:44.000Well, it's just amazing when they uncover these things.
02:17:47.000I love the ones they find in Mexico when they're building something and then they stumble upon some ancient Aztec temple.
02:17:54.000Not many people who go to Chichen Itza and see the temple of Kukul Khan there, the pyramid of Kukul Khan, which is the famous monument of Chichen Itza, not many people realize that there's another pyramid inside it.
02:18:40.000Anyway, inside it is a whole second pyramid.
02:18:42.000The pyramid that we see has been built on top of an earlier one, and there's a passageway that leads up to the top of it, and there's an altar, and there's a figure of a puma or a jaguar inside.
02:20:34.000Unless you can find your way, unless by some miracle you can find your way through that fog, where the very first thing, if you're going to do that, that you have to do is you have to calm your mind.
02:22:05.000And it helped the book to get noticed because there was great skepticism about buying a second volume from my publishers unless the first volume worked.
02:22:15.000And the first volume worked enough for me to be commissioned to write volume two of War God, which is called War God, Return of the Plumed Serpent.
02:22:23.000And that is published on the 9th of October.
02:22:26.000And I'm making the same special offer.
02:22:43.000Scroll down at the bottom of the page that shows the covers of all the editions and you will find a statement there and that is that if people write to me, if people pre-order, first of all they have to pre-order, either order Volume 1 or pre-order Volume 2. Amazon don't take your money until they actually send the book and I've got the links to Amazon.com there.
02:23:03.000I will, when I finish my travels, and I'm going to be on the road until the 27th of October, but during November, I will send out those book plates again.
02:23:15.000But what I can't do this time is I can't get into personal correspondence with people.
02:23:50.000Show me that you've bought the book or pre-ordered Volume 2, and above all, please give me your postal address, because you can't imagine how many times people write to me Asking for the book plates, and don't give me their postal address.
02:24:02.000And when I get back from my travels, I will sign the book plates.
02:24:06.000I will send you a signed book plate, which is simply a label that you can stick inside your copy of the book.
02:24:11.000And if that results in a bit more uptake for War God II, it'll be good for me, because it's very difficult to start a sort of new career as a novelist at the age of 64. But you seem to be really enjoying it.
02:24:37.000What would drive a man like Cortez to take 490 men and face them against the might of the Aztec Empire?
02:24:44.000Hundreds of thousands of men under arms who will kill you in the most awful way if they...
02:24:48.000If they catch you, what kind of will does it take to do that?
02:24:52.000And it's been interesting for me to get inside the heads of these people and also to consider, because I'm interested in them, supernatural elements.
02:24:59.000Were they being misled by demonic forces in some way?
02:25:03.000That's something that I examine there.
02:25:04.000So I love doing it, but I'm known as a nonfiction author, and that's mainly what I do.
02:25:10.000People buy nonfiction because they're interested in the subject very often.
02:25:14.000People buy a novelist because they trust that novelist and know that his next book will be good.
02:25:18.000And I need to build up that leadership.
02:25:33.000It was only really when I started drinking ayahuasca in 2003. I suppose for a decade before that, I'd been immersed in the ancient Egyptian texts.
02:25:47.000And the ancient Egyptians are all about the quest for immortal life.
02:25:53.000They're all about how you live this life to continue on as a spirit and ultimately to live the life of millions of years.
02:26:02.000And they very clearly indicate that Dark forces are at work in the universe which can mislead us, as well as there are light and positive forces that we can choose to follow which will lead us into very nurturing and worthwhile and excellent directions.
02:26:54.000I think that what happens in a deeply altered state of consciousness is that we retune the receiver wavelength of the brain and encounter other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses.
02:27:06.000And the first thing I would say to any...
02:27:08.000I know that a number of people who've worked with psychedelics in depth haven't come to that conclusion.
02:27:13.000I know that, but the conclusion that I come to, the little offering that I bring to the table and that many others have brought, is that there is a separate freestanding reality of some kind which we don't fully understand yet, and that in altered states of consciousness we can encounter,
02:28:34.000I accept I could be fantasizing it all.
02:28:36.000It's interesting that other people encounter pretty much the same beings and the same sort of drive to do something better than they've done before.
02:28:46.000It's interesting that there's that transpersonal side of it.
02:28:48.000I choose to believe that there are freestanding parallel dimensions and that we are encountering them in altered states of consciousness and that therefore there's interesting scientific work to be done because in theory we could actually begin the targeted exploration of those dimensions by using volunteers and psychedelics.
02:29:05.000I choose to believe that that's what's going on.
02:29:26.000And the reference frame, and this is again where I got myself into so much trouble with Ted.
02:29:31.000The reference frame is the reference frame of materialist science, and that reference frame says that all consciousness is a kind of accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity.
02:29:43.000There's actually no reality to consciousness.
02:29:46.000That is not something that's been proven scientifically and experimentally.
02:29:50.000It is just the way that a large and influential group of scientists see the world, that everything can be reduced to material causes.
02:29:57.000So the changes in brain activity that accompany visions, you can observe those changes on an MRI scanner, those changes in brain activity Are the experience you're having according to this reference frame.
02:30:11.000Your experience can just be reduced to that and there's nothing else to it.
02:30:22.000It could easily be the other way around.
02:30:25.000That the brain activity is simply necessary in order for us to see something that was always there, but that was normally closed off to our senses.
02:30:34.000So, the compelling argument as far as, like, what's happening when you're having these extreme visual experiences, what is the argument?
02:31:00.000Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, you're very familiar with his work because you presented the spirit molecule.
02:31:06.000Rick Strassman does entertain the possibility that what is going on is not merely in and of our brains, but does represent stable freestanding spirit.
02:31:17.000We have no facts in this, but we have an incredibly intriguing area to inquire into.
02:31:22.000Yeah, and it's also one of those things where I feel like when you've experienced it yourself, you get a really better frame of reference as to why is this compelling at all.
02:31:30.000Because it sounds preposterous to someone who has no experience.
02:31:39.000But, you know, there's that thing that people, when you want to define certain aspects of whatever the psychedelic experience is, where they seem to be almost impossible to define for people who have actually experienced it.
02:31:54.000The real problem is when someone who hasn't experienced it tries to define it.
02:31:58.000And it's like, man, you can come up with a bunch of really...
02:32:21.000It's bad science to present it as fact when it isn't.
02:32:25.000Many times, given this very simple analogy of the telescope, which I think explains the logical problem in the materialist view, if you want to look at a distant star with your telescope, you're going to point it at the right area of the sky, first of all, and then you're going to focus it.
02:32:40.000And as you focus it, physical changes will take place in the relationship between the lenses inside the barrel of the telescope.
02:33:04.000And that's the same idea with DMT, that it's changing brain function to allow you to see something that you couldn't – it's refocusing the brain, in other words.
02:34:08.000It's fine to speak of it, but it's disrespectful to put it down without having had the guts, actually, to have the experience yourself.
02:34:16.000Don't you think it's becoming more and more accepted, though?
02:34:19.000Because I think for a long time, academics resisted taking it, or if they did take it, talking about it, because they didn't want to be labelled.
02:34:25.000Because there's a lot of people that will label you if you talk about psychedelic drugs.
02:34:30.000Until very recently, it's been considered a career-ruining move, you know, for any academic to speak positively to psychedelics.
02:34:34.000Even though they all knew the news, they all knew the positive side of this.
02:34:38.000But this is, again, gradually changing.
02:34:40.000And again, I think the American role, the role of the American people in changing the legal status of cannabis state by state is also going to feed into this and allow us to have a more rational dialogue regarding psychedelics.
02:34:55.000Of course, I'm not saying to people, go out and take psychedelics.
02:34:59.000What I'm saying is that these are very powerful agents and that they can be extremely healing, used in the right way, and they can change our whole view of reality.
02:35:10.000Why should we be forbidden to explore that if, as responsible adults, we choose to do so?
02:35:16.000Yeah, the argument is stupid, and I think the argument is eventually going away, and I think it'll be replaced by a new argument, and then the new argument is, what the fuck is really happening?
02:35:44.000And if people are having very bad experiences from time to time with psychedelics, part of the reason for that is the world we've created where these are illegal and where it's impossible for people to get good advice that they can trust and where there's this atmosphere of danger and threat that surrounds it.
02:35:58.000Take all that away and this very powerful instrument can be managed much more effectively.
02:36:04.000No doubt, and I equate it in a lot of ways, this idea of it being bad and negative.
02:36:11.000I equate it in a lot of ways to vaccinations, and here's why.
02:36:14.000There's this anti-vaccination movement in this country, and a lot of people feel like vaccinations are unnecessary, and they may have some good arguments.
02:36:23.000They may have some good arguments, especially about certain vaccinations for things that are sexually transmitted diseases and things along those lines, like hepatitis shots and shit you're giving to little kids.
02:36:33.000There's a real good argument against that.
02:36:36.000And there's definitely an argument that there's a lot of medication that kids are taking, and is it the right amount?
02:36:43.000But there's no argument that vaccinations haven't saved a fuckton of lives, because they have.
02:36:49.000They've stopped a lot of diseases dead in their tracks.
02:37:23.000So, it's one of those scenarios, very much like psychedelics, in a way that there are going to be some rare cases if we make psychedelics legal across the board.
02:37:34.000There's going to be some rare cases of a person in a bad state of mind or a bad...
02:37:38.000Mental makeup or, you know, what have you, bad psychological makeup, fill in the blanks, where they take it and it's detrimental to them.
02:37:46.000And that'll be highly publicized and used as an argument to stop all of these freedoms.
02:37:51.000And Bill Hicks had the very best answer to that, as I'm sure you remember, you know, the lunatic who leaps out of the window imagine he can fly on LSD. Why didn't the fucker try and take off from the ground, you know?
02:38:04.000Yeah, he goes, we lost a moron, the world got lighter.
02:38:09.000The World Got Lighter is one of my favorite lines.
02:38:12.000Yeah, but that's, um, that is, uh, you know...
02:38:17.000It's just a strange argument to keep people from doing it because, especially this doctor that we were talking about earlier that's talking about cannabis and the addictive properties of cannabis.
02:38:26.000This isn't even talking to someone who was addicted to cannabis than you.
02:38:30.000It's still, it's a silly, like there's a lot going on when someone's addicted.
02:38:41.000The ones that chemically make you addicted is the ones you're getting money from.
02:38:44.000And that's why people have We're fed up with all of this shit because it's so corrupt and it's so wrong and it's time that a new direction was taken.
02:38:51.000And there are people who are on the wrong side of history on this.
02:41:12.000If we had explained it in a galactic term, it would be like you're parking yourself next to the membrane between dimensions.
02:41:20.000I mean, you are literally in this world over here, and right next to your face is a whole other world.
02:41:26.000We couldn't even imagine that, but that's the fuck exactly what it is.
02:41:29.000If you go to Santa Monica, and you go over by where that pier is, and you just walk along that sand, and just start walking out into that water, you're in another world in like 20 steps.
02:44:38.000The unknown, which is the big freaker.
02:44:39.000You know, you're looking at this black monster, and sometimes when it's this black monster, you get a better sense of it than when it's this beautiful blue thing during the day, when the sun's hitting it, it's reflecting, because then you get all this visual stuff that's distracting you from the fact, that's how fuck It's a giant fuckload of water.
02:44:53.000It's a giant fuckload of water and it's right there.
02:45:18.000You know, Randall was so far ahead of the curve in recognizing that the gigantic flooding that came off the North American ice cap...
02:45:24.000It wasn't just caused by what I used to think it was caused by, which is that lakes of meltwater develop on the surface of the ice cap and finally the ice dam breaks and the meltwater pours out.
02:45:36.000Randall has been pointing out for years that the water flows were much too radical for that.
02:45:41.000Something much bigger had to be involved.
02:45:44.000So he was well ahead of the evidence when scientists began to realize that the North American ice cap had been hit by a comet.
02:45:52.00012,980 years ago, set in motion the epoch that geologists called the Younger Dryas.
02:45:57.000So Randall is a great expert in this area.
02:46:01.000My wife, Santa, is traveling with us as well, and a friend of Randall's who's worked with him for many years called Bradley, and we're going to do a road trip from Portland, Oregon, all the way to Minneapolis, following the...
02:46:13.000It's about 2,000 miles, I believe, following the southern edge of the former ice cap, and Randall's going to show us the Good Lord!
02:47:45.000I'm going to take loads and loads of pictures, and we're going to go up in an airplane a few times and look at the land underneath us, and it's going to be a great, exciting research trip.
02:47:53.000And it's the last research trip for this sequel that I'm writing to Facebook.
02:47:56.000I'm sure you've seen this most recent discovery about microdiamonds.
02:48:05.000Any scientists who were attempting to argue that there wasn't a comet impact, now, with all the evidence that's come in over the last five or six years, it's just settled by the nanodiamonds, scattered in a huge swathe all over the world, which are a sure chemical imprint of a massive comet impact.
02:48:26.000And this was an episode that changed the world.
02:48:29.000It killed off many of the megafauna that we've all heard of, the mammoths, the woody rhinos and so on and so forth.
02:48:35.000And it got rid of what was called the Clovis culture, hunter-gatherer culture in the United States.
02:48:40.000And I think it got rid of a whole civilization that we've only remembered in myth and memory.
02:48:45.000At least that's the line that I'm investigating.
02:48:48.000It's a fascinating line, especially when as each visit that you come back to the podcast, there's new information.
02:48:55.000The last time it was the nuclear glass that they discovered when they were doing core samples again, which is about 12,000 years ago, right?
02:49:02.000And then the new one is this microdiamonds.
02:49:03.000It seems like over and over again, it becomes not a possibility but a reality that there was some sort of an impact.
02:49:14.000It was massive in America, but the effect was everywhere.
02:49:17.000Both impacts, because this comment broke up into fragments like Shoemaker-Levy 9, both impacts, but also, very important, the gigantic cloud of dust that's thrown up into the upper atmosphere.
02:49:29.000So you have this immediate reaction of flooding as the comet liquidizes part of the North American ice cap, and then a huge dust plume is up in the air all over the world, and the whole Earth is shrouded in dust.
02:49:41.000And cooled, because it's reflecting back the sun's rays.
02:49:44.000So we go into this 1,300, 1,400-year period called the Younger Dryas, where the Earth gets incredibly cold, even though previously it had been coming out of the...
02:49:56.000And then, weirdly, all our history, everything we think of as our past, begins at the end of the Younger Dryas, kicks in 12,980 years ago, ends 11,600 years ago.
02:50:22.000It's amazing that all this information keeps coming up to support this, and it's amazing if we do consider the possibility that it is true, that everything can be essentially shut back down to zero with some rocks from the sky.
02:50:40.000There is a very distinct possibility that we could be hit by something.
02:50:44.000The NASA photographs of the, I think they call it the black diamond, the Earth at night, What you see is certain areas of the world are brightly lit up.
02:50:57.000On the other hand, Africa and large parts of South America are dark because there's no electrification in those areas.
02:51:06.000And those photographs are often taken to speak of our achievement.
02:51:11.000Look how we can light up the planet like a Christmas tree so that it can be viewed from space.
02:51:17.000But I would say it also says another thing, that if we were to confront again the same sort of cataclysm that hit the Earth 12,980 years ago, Then the people who would survive and carry the human story forward would be those very people who live in the dark areas,
02:51:37.000And we who live in the glowing lights that show up on those NASA photographs, who've become so specialized, who most of us are unable even to know how to plant a vegetable or hunt an animal, we're the ones who would be gone.
02:51:51.000And the whole order of the world would be reversed.
02:52:23.000Without a doubt, the information is something to consider.
02:52:26.000Just the information about these It's something to consider.
02:52:32.000And it's also something to consider that if that's correct, boy, what a magical time it must have been back when they had developed some sort of technology that was enabling them to make structures like Gobekli Tepe.
02:52:46.000That's why I'm calling the book Magicians of the Gods, because there's something magical, something about it that we would call magic, but perhaps was just another form of science.
02:52:57.000Yeah, whatever they were able to do, I mean, it's amazing that we haven't figured it out yet, but we're so arrogant in our assumptions that it had to be all the ways that we've already figured out.
02:53:11.000Like this new ability that they've just found out, that they've taken people and they've used the internet to send information from one person's mind to another person's mind 5,000 miles away.
02:53:22.000But nobody else did that before that, so we didn't really think that that was it.
02:53:25.000We thought maybe it would be a possibility We're good to go.
02:53:47.000And it's almost like the universe is giving us a puzzle that's so incredibly in your face with its most obvious results.
02:53:55.000And because we have these preconceived notions, that we're not willing to accept that as a possibility.
02:54:04.000Like when people look at the pyramids, they go, well, you know, the thing is they build ramps and they use stone rollers and like, There's a whole faction who will look for the most boring, meaningless possible explanation.
02:54:16.000But the fact that there are large groups of people whose mission is to look for the most boring rather than the most extraordinary possibility, it's good.
02:54:23.000That's how we have balance in our society.
02:54:25.000We do need to look with a skeptical eye and say that there could be mundane explanations for this.
02:54:30.000But we also need to keep a tiny fraction of our research effort, perhaps a very small fraction indeed, To exploring alternative ideas.
02:54:39.000Because if they do come out right, they change everything in the way that the mundane things don't.
02:55:31.000Yeah, these ideas are fascinating, but what I was going to say was that it's almost like the number is so large, like 2,300,000 stones in the Great Pyramid, which is so bizarre.
02:55:42.000Six million tons, blocks of 50 to 70 tons, roofing the King's Chamber, elevated to heights of 300 feet above the ground.
02:55:51.000It's almost perfectly aligned to true north, south, east, and west within a fraction of a single degree.
02:55:57.000So crazy that if they could come back from the past and if they come to our time today and go, wait a minute, how did you guys think we did this?
02:56:41.000If anybody out there would like to take me up on this offer, just go to grahamhancock.com, go to the War God page, which you'll find easily.
02:56:48.000Scroll down and see where to write to me.
02:56:50.000I have to repeat again, I will send you the book plates, but I can't correspond.
02:56:55.000And it will be November before I'm in a position to send the book plates, because I'm on the road continuously until the 27th.
02:57:29.000And your book, Fingerprints of the Gods, I've said it before when you've been on the podcast before, changed my single-handedly, changed my ideas about history.
02:57:37.000Changed my ideas, not in any way discounting the amazing work that traditional historians have done, but just that these things exist that defy explanation and that I didn't know.
02:57:49.000Just the fact that there is a guy from Boston University named Robert Schock, who's a prominent geologist, who said, this is clear erosion, and the last time there was erosion was 9000 BC. You're talking about an insane amount of time has passed since there was thousands of years of that rainfall,
02:58:11.000That's what I tried to do in Fingerprints, was to bring together people like John Anthony West, who brought Robert Shock to the Sphinx, like Robert Boval, like Randon Rose Flemath.
02:58:19.000A lot of researchers were working in the field and coming up with extraordinary information.
02:58:22.000And part of what I did in that book was to bring all that information together into a kind of synthesis, I suppose.
02:58:27.000It's such an interesting theory, and it's such an interesting subject, and now that it keeps getting substantiated by places like Gobekli Tepe or these micrometeors, it's sort of like piece the puzzle together slowly but surely.
02:58:39.000I think as time goes on, we're going to find there's going to be a bunch of civilizations that we uncover.
02:58:43.000Those ones that they're finding in Mexico, and then, of course, there's ones that they're finding in the Amazon, where they think, just like we were talking about with the other- Fascinating.
02:58:50.000They find a hill, and they think it's a hill, and then someone realizes, like, holy shit, this is a building, guys.
02:58:55.000Huge earthworks in the Amazon, stone circles.
02:58:58.000You know, that's another place to look for a lost civilization.